The National Football League appointed prominent lawyer Ted Wells on Wednesday to independently investigate allegations of harassment and hazing in the Miami Dolphins' locker room, the league said.

The investigation — the results of which NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said would be made public — comes as a new report claims Dolphins coaches asked guard Richie Incognito to "toughen up" offensive tackle Jonathan Martin after he missed voluntary workouts last spring.

Incognito — a hulking, 319-pound veteran with a muddy record of unnecessary roughness and dirty play who is accused of sending his teammate racist and threatening text messages and voicemails — apparently took the assignment too far, multiple sources told the South Florida Sun-Sentinelnewspaper.

That’s not to say that such a thing never happened on any team run by any of the great coaches of past. I’m saying that you would have never heard of it. There is no way they would have let something like this get out of hand, even if they ever did encourage some players to give other players some shit. They had control of their players, and could nip something in the bud, before it blew up in their faces, and anything like this, would have been handled by a team, internally. Today, it seems both players and coaches are showing a surprising lack of good judgement.

Coaches and management are losing control of their players, both on and off the field. Can you imagine Vince Lombardi putting up with a player looking like:

this? or this?

It’s just hair, it’s no big deal, right? OK, fair enough. Then can you imagine any of Vince Lombardi’s players acting like this?

3 comments:

I think of the old greats, the men who played for the love of the battle, not the seven-figure incomes and endorsement deals. The new players are the first generation of our public indoctrination system, the willfull emasculation of students with non-competition, participation trophies and zero-tolerance of anything.

I think what is happening to the NFL is analogous to what’s happening to our country. As players/citizens stray further and further away from the values and ideas that made the NFL/USA great, fans/taxpayers will lose interest in supporting the institution. Without support, the institution fails.